The Woman Who Stole My Life Read online

‘It’s not very fair, though, is it?’ he said.

  ‘WHOEVER SAID LIFE WAS FAIR?’

  I was getting much better at the blinking, or maybe he was getting better at reading me. He often guessed the whole word from the first letter. It meant I didn’t get tired so quickly and I could say more.

  He noticed the book his wife had given me. ‘How are you getting on with this?’

  Fantastic, as it happened. We were nearly at the end.

  When Dad had first seen it, he’d started twitching with suspicion. ‘I’m not reading you anything till it has Joan’s imprimatur.’ He’d taken it away in his plastic bag and he’d returned with Joan’s blessing. ‘She says it’s well written.’

  Then, of course, I assumed it would be dreadful.

  But, to my great surprise, the book from Mannix Taylor’s wife was fun. It was a biography of an upper-class British woman who had caused a big scandal in the thirties by leaving her husband and running away to Kenya and having all manner of high jinks. Both Dad and I were gripped and entertained. ‘I feel sort of … wrong,’ Dad had said. ‘For enjoying it so much. But if Joan says it’s okay …’

  I blinked to Mannix Taylor, ‘BRING ANOTHER.’

  ‘Another what? Book? Okay, I’ll ask Georgie to pick out a few more for you.’

  Georgie. So that was her name: Georgie Taylor. The Scandinavian-looking interior-decorator-stroke-child-psychologist. I’d been wondering what she was called.

  ‘Anyway!’ He really did seem in sparkling good form this afternoon. ‘Ask me what I’m doing here!’

  As I began to blink, he said, hastily, ‘No, don’t! Figure of speech. Well, Stella Sweeney? How do you fancy a day out?’

  What did he mean?

  ‘We’ve got the go-ahead for the EMG! This crowd will let you out and the other crowd will let you in!’

  Oh!

  ‘How did I manage it? I won’t bore you with the details. There’s a clause … Ah, no, I’m not getting into it, the tedium would kill you and I’m bound by the Hippocratic oath to try to keep you alive. It doesn’t matter. All that matters is that it’s a go. Your husband will have to sign no end of insurance papers, but basically we’re on.’

  Hope rushed up through me. Finally I’d get some idea of how much longer this hell would last.

  Suddenly Mannix Taylor became serious. ‘You remember what I said? It’ll hurt. As I told you, it’s actually better if it does; it shows you’re getting better.’

  I had a memory of the lumbar puncture and I was filled with fear.

  ‘But it’ll be okay!’ He sounded like he was trying to cheer up a child. ‘We’ll go in an ambulance. We’ll put the blue light and the siren on and we’ll speed through the streets. We can pretend to be foreign dignitaries. We’ll have a great time. What nationality do you want to be?’

  Easy. ‘ITA –’

  ‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘Italian is too … Everyone wants to be Italian. Have a bit of imagination.’

  The neck of the man! Every time I started to like him, he went and ruined it. I wanted to be Italian. I was Italian. I was Giuliana from Milan. I worked for Gucci. I got free things.

  Mutinously, I glared at him. I’m Italian, I’m Italian, I’m Italian.

  Then, with an unexpected change of heart, I decided I wanted to be Brazilian. What had I been thinking? Brazil was where it was at. I lived in Rio and was a brilliant dancer and had a big bum but it didn’t matter.

  ‘BRAZ –’

  ‘Brazilian! Now you’re talking. And what about me? I’ll be … Let’s see. I think I’d like to be Argentinian.’

  Fine with me.

  ‘You don’t think it’s a waste that we’ve both picked the same continent?’ he asked, suddenly anxious. ‘When we have the whole world to choose from? No,’ he said, firmly. ‘I definitely want to be Argentinian. I’m a gaucho from the pampas.’

  With feeling, he added, ‘God, I fecking wish I was. I’d spend every day riding my faithful horse, rounding up cattle, no one to answer to, and at the weekends I’d go into town and dance the tango. With other gauchos,’ he said, his mood darkening. ‘Because there aren’t enough women. We have to dance with each other and sometimes when we’re doing the flicky leg moves, we accidentally get each other in the balls.’ He sighed. ‘But we don’t hold it against each other. We make the best of things.’

  ‘YOU’RE A NUTTER.’

  ‘Believe me,’ he said. ‘That isn’t news.’

  Tuesday, 3 June

  09.22

  My breakfast is 100g of salmon. I’d have been happier having nothing.

  I am not a protein person. I am very much a carb person.

  10.09

  Despite my joyless breakfast, I commence work. Today will be a good writing day. Of this I am certain.

  10.11

  I need coffee.

  10.21

  I recommence work. I feel inspired, invigorated … Is that the post?

  10.24

  I get into bed with the newly delivered Boden catalogue and I peruse the pages with great concentration, assessing every item of clothing for its belly-reducing qualities.

  13.17

  The front door opens and slams shut. Jeffrey shouts, ‘Mom,’ and starts pounding up the stairs. I leap out of bed and try to look like a person who has been working diligently all morning. Jeffrey bursts into my bedroom, in a state of high agitation. He looks at my rumpled duvet and says, suspiciously, ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Nothing! Writing. What’s up?’

  ‘Where’s your iPad?’ He holds up his phone. ‘It’s Dad’s karma project. It’s happening.’

  I start clicking and together Jeffrey and I check things out. Ryan has uploaded sixty-three pictures of things to be given away, including his house, his car and his motorbike. Feeling sick, I scroll through the images of his beautiful furniture, his lamps, his many televisions.

  ‘Hey!’ I feel a surge of possessiveness as I recognize something of mine. ‘That’s my Jesus Christ figurine!’ A neighbour of Mum’s had given it to me when I was sick. It’s super-creepy. I hadn’t wanted it when Ryan and I separated, but now that it’s about to be given away to some random stranger, I do.

  Ryan’s video has been watched eighty-nine times. Ninety. Ninety-one. Ninety-seven. One hundred and thirty-four. The numbers are mushrooming right before our eyes. It’s like watching a natural disaster unfold.

  ‘Why is he doing this?’ I ask.

  ‘Because he’s a prick?’ Jeffrey says.

  ‘Seriously?’

  ‘Maybe he wants to be famous.’

  Fame. It’s what everyone thinks they want. The good fame, of course. Not the bad fame, where you throw a cat into a wheely bin and you get caught on CCTV and it goes viral on YouTube and you become an international pariah.

  But the good sort of fame, that’s not so great either, certainly not as nice as it sounds. I’ll tell you about it sometime.

  13.28

  I ring Ryan. It goes straight to voicemail.

  13.31

  I ring Ryan. It goes straight to voicemail.

  13.33

  I ring Ryan. It goes straight to voicemail.

  13.34

  Jeffrey rings Ryan. It goes straight to voicemail.

  13.36

  Jeffrey rings Ryan. It goes straight to voicemail.

  13.38

  Jeffrey rings Ryan. It goes straight to voicemail.

  13.40–13.43

  I eat eleven Jaffa Cakes.

  14.24

  A new photo appears on Ryan’s site – his Nespresso machine.

  14.25

  Another new photo appears on the site; this time it’s a blender … Followed by three cans of tomatoes. A bread board. Five tea-towels.

  ‘He’s doing his kitchen,’ Jeffrey whispers. We’re frozen in horror as we watch the screen.

  Here comes a frying pan … and … another frying pan … and half a jar of curry paste. Who would want half a jar of curry paste? The man’s a lunati
c.

  This is my fault. I should never have got a publishing deal and moved to New York. It should have been obvious that, at some stage, Ryan would do something to reassert himself as the true creative person, of the two of us.

  More and more photos of his possessions are appearing with each passing second – a salad spinner, a toasted sandwich-maker, a collection of forks, a packet of Custard Creams.

  ‘Custard Creams?’ Jeffrey sounds dazed. ‘Who eats Custard Creams in this day and age?’

  Ryan’s video has now been viewed 2,564 times. 2,577. 2,609 …

  ‘Should we go over there and stop him?’ Jeffrey asks.

  ‘Let me think.’

  14.44

  I lurch at my handbag, unzip the secret inner pocket, locate my one emergency Xanax and take half of it.

  ‘What’s that?’ Jeffrey asks.

  ‘… Ah … a Xanax.’

  ‘A tranquillizer? Where did you get it?’

  ‘Karen. She says every woman should keep a Xanax in the secret zippy pocket of her handbag. In case of emergency. This is an emergency.’

  14.48

  Karen rings. ‘Listen,’ she says. ‘There’s some weird shit going down with Ryan –’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Has he lost his reason?’

  ‘It looks that way.’

  ‘What are you going to do about it? You’ll have to get him sectioned.’

  ‘How would I do that?’

  ‘I’ll ask Enda. I’ll call you back.’

  14.49

  ‘Enda’s going to find out how to get Ryan sectioned,’ I tell Jeffrey.

  ‘Okay. Good.’

  ‘Yes. Good. That’s right. Good. We’ll get him nice and sectioned and everything will be grand.’

  But I have a niggly suspicion that getting a person sectioned isn’t as easy as it sounds. And that once they’re sectioned it may be hard to get them un-sectioned.

  I take the other half of the Xanax.

  15.01

  ‘Let’s go over to his house and try to reason with him,’ I decide.

  Ryan lives only a couple of miles away and both Jeffrey and I have keys.

  ‘How? You’re going to drive? You’ve just taken two tranquillizers.’

  ‘One tranquillizer,’ I correct him. ‘One. In two halves.’

  But he’s right. I can’t drive, having just taken a Xanax. Something bad might happen.

  ‘Very well,’ I say with hauteur. ‘We’ll walk.’

  ‘And you’ll fall into a ditch. And I’ll have to pull you out.’

  ‘This is an urban area, there are no ditches.’ But my voice is starting to sound a little slurred. I might not fall into a ditch but ten minutes into the walk I might decide it would be delightfully pleasant to lie down on the pavement and smile beatifically at passing pedestrians.

  ‘Why must you take drugs?’ Jeffrey sounds angry.

  ‘I don’t “take drugs”. This is a medicine! Prescribed by a doctor!’

  ‘It wasn’t your doctor.’

  ‘A technicality, Jeffrey. A mere technicality.’

  ‘We need to talk to somebody sensible.’

  We eye each other and even in my rapidly burgeoning Xanax-cocoon, I feel pain. I know what Jeffrey is going to say.

  ‘No,’ I say.

  ‘But –’

  ‘No, he’s not part of our lives any longer.’

  ‘But –’

  ‘No.’

  The sound of my phone ringing makes me jump. ‘It’s Ryan!’

  ‘Give it to me.’ Jeffrey grabs it. ‘Dad. Dad! Have you gone totally nuts?’

  After a short conversation, all on Ryan’s side, Jeffrey hangs up. He looks crestfallen. ‘He says it’s his stuff and he can do what he likes with it.’

  Overwhelmed by my own incapacity, I eat three more Jaffa Cakes. No, four. No, five. No –

  ‘Stop.’ Jeffrey pulls the box away from me.

  ‘They’re my Jaffa Cakes!’ I sound a bit wild.

  He holds the box above his head. ‘Can’t you find some other way of dealing with things? Instead of drugging yourself with Xanax or sugar?’

  ‘No, not right now, no.’

  ‘I’m going to meditate.’

  ‘Okay, well, I’m just going to …’

  … lie on my bed and feel floaty. And retrieve another box of Jaffa Cakes from my ‘wall’.

  ‘How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.’

  Extract from One Blink at a Time

  I was in a blissful floaty place, a white happy nothing-land. Every time I began to eddy to the surface, where hard-edged reality awaited, something happened and I tumbled back down to the pain-free paradise.

  But not this time. I was coming up; I was rising and rising and rising, until I popped through the surface and I was awake and in my hospital bed.

  Dad was sitting on a chair, reading a book. ‘Ah, Stella, there you are! You’ve been in the land of nod for the last two days.’

  My head was fuzzy.

  ‘You had your EMG test,’ Dad said.

  I did?

  ‘It took it out of you,’ Dad said. ‘They gave you drugs so you’d sleep.’

  The horrible details started coming back to me. First there had been stuff to do with the legal responsibility of me: I’d had to be temporarily discharged by Dr Montgomery from this hospital into Ryan’s care – which went okay. But then Ryan was supposed to sign me over to Mannix Taylor until I reached the other hospital, and Ryan was bristling with hostility. And when Mannix Taylor said, ‘I’ll take good care of her,’ it had only made things worse. Ryan compressed his mouth into a tight line and I’d been afraid that he was actually going to refuse to sign.

  After about ten tense seconds, he scribbled something on the consent form and off we’d set. Four orderlies were required to get me from the ward into the ambulance. I’d been disconnected from my heart monitor and catheter – ‘Special treat,’ Mannix Taylor had said – but I still had one porter wheeling my ventilator, another manoeuvring my drip and two more pushing my bed. Everyone had to move at exactly the same speed, in case the ventilator man went too fast and whipped the tube out of my throat and I suffocated.

  Also in my posse was a nurse and Mannix Taylor.

  The day before the test, Mannix had brought a printout into the ward. ‘Would you like a Brazilian name for tomorrow? I’ve a list here: Julia, Isabella, Sophia, Manuela, Maria Eduarda, Giovanna, Alice, Laura, Luiza …’

  I blinked: Luiza it was!

  ‘And what about me?’ he asked. ‘I need an Argentinian name. Santiago, Benjamin, Lautaro, Alvarez.’ He looked at me. ‘Alvarez,’ he repeated. ‘That’s a good one. It means “noble guardian”, which is appropriate, I thought.’

  I didn’t respond, so he kept on reading the list. ‘… Joaquin, Santino, Valentino, Thiago –’

  I blinked. I liked Thiago.

  ‘How about Alvarez?’ he said. ‘I like Alvarez.’

  ‘TH –’

  ‘Thiago? Really? Not Alvarez? Alvarez means “noble guardian”.’

  ‘SO YOU SAID. YOU’RE THIAGO.’

  I was incensed. I mean, why had he read out the other names if he’d already decided?

  ‘Alvarez,’ he said.

  Thiago.

  He stared me down, then lowered his eyes in submission. ‘Thiago it is. You’ve a will of iron.’

  God, he was a fine one to talk.

  In the ambulance he said, ‘So, Luiza, you live in Rio, a city of constant sunshine, and you’re a star in a telenovela. After work every day you go to the beach. You buy your clothes from … well, wherever you like – you fill in the details. But listen to me, if the test gets too much, pretend you’re Luiza, not Stella. And,’ he added, ‘if it really gets too much, we can just stop.’

  No. We wouldn’t be stopping. This was my one chance to find out when I’d be getting better and I wasn’t wasting it.

  ‘Think Brazil,’ he reiterated. ‘Right.’ He looked out through the l
ittle window. ‘We’re here.’

  At the new hospital, I was unloaded with great care from the ambulance onto the tarmac, but we didn’t go in. We seemed to be waiting for someone.

  ‘Where the hell is he?’ I heard Mannix mutter.

  A pair of shiny black shoes came striding towards our little party. There was something about them that told me their owner was aquiver with rage.

  As the shoes got closer I realized they belonged to this new hospital’s version of Dr Montgomery – he had the same god-like air and the same collection of awestruck young doctors.

  ‘You’re unbelievable,’ he said to Mannix, in a shrill, angry voice. ‘The insurance headache you’ve created … Where’s the thing to be signed?’ Some craven helper-person stuck a clipboard under his nose and he tore an angry signature onto it.

  ‘Right,’ Mannix said, ‘we’re in.’

  With my small army of helpers, we proceeded down corridors, up in a lift, down more corridors and into a room. The mood, which had been almost festive, suddenly dipped. The orderlies and the nurse hastily withdrew and Mannix introduced me to Corinne, the technician who’d be carrying out the tests.

  ‘Thank you, Dr Taylor,’ she said. ‘I’ll page you when we’re done.’

  ‘I’ll stay,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, right …’ She seemed surprised.

  ‘If Stella needs to tell us anything …’

  ‘Oh. Okay …’

  She turned her attention to me. ‘Stella, I’m going to attach an electrode to a nerve point on your right leg and send electricity through it,’ she said. ‘Your response will send information to the machine. I’ll move the electrode to various nerve points on your body until adequate data has been accumulated to inform us of the functionality of your central nervous system. Ready?’

  Afraid, actually.

  ‘Ready?’ she repeated.

  Ready.

  When the first electric shock went through me, I knew immediately that I couldn’t do this. The pain was far worse than I’d expected. I wasn’t able to shriek, but my body jerked from the force.

  ‘Okay?’ Corinne asked.

  I was reeling. I understood now what Mannix Taylor had been trying to tell me: this was really painful. So painful that I’d have to go to another place in my head to survive it. I tried to remember what he’d been saying in the ambulance – I was Luiza. I was Brazilian. I had a starring role in a telenovela.